Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Enable VNC Server in Mac OS X

This is so easy I can't believe it's taken me this long to find it. This works for Snow Leopard and Lion as far as I know, though I've only tested it on Lion.

Go this route:

System Preferences

Sharing

Choose "Screen Sharing" and check the box to turn it on

Click "Computer Settings..."

Enable the "VNC views may control screen with password:" option and give it a password. Password length is limited to 8 characters.

Now you can connect to and control your Mac from your favorite VNC application, including free versions like Mocha VNC (Lite) for iPhone or Chicken of the VNC for Mac. I personally use Mocha VNC and it is a very good VNC app for my casual use. It is surprisingly fast over my home network Wireless-G iPhone 3GS to Gigabit-connected early-2007 iMac, and it works perfect with my iMac's dual monitor setup. It's the best Spotify "remote" I've found yet.

About Me

I'm a Christian, husband, electrical engineer, Mac guy, dirt bike freak, dog owner, and photographer. One of my classic statements about any given project is "I could have done this in high school if I spent enough time reading (and hacking)." Sometime in the last couple years I realized that this really is true, but I'd have to spend about 10 years reading and hacking to do it. Oh, wait, that's what I did.

Over those 10 years of reading and hacking I've been listed as co-inventor on 10+ patents; architected new embedded communication and data encoding schemes; taken multiple PCB projects from napkin sketches to preproduction shipments including power, high voltage, analog, and digital circuitry; designed, wrote, and sell software for automated industrial machines; published an iPhone app; and hacked Apple mobile device hardware and software.

I publish these articles because I fully agree with Brett Victor's Method of Learning infographic. I may be an average engineer, but I'm an above average internet searcher, if nothing else. With this in mind I'm starting to understand that if it took me hours/days/weeks of research to learn then there are many people out there who could save hours/days/weeks because of some of these articles.